Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation

[Copper Bezel]

I feel the need to state the obvious for some reason, but Star Trek is so ill-suited to children's toys that the existence of Star Wars isn't just not a relevant comparison, it's an illustration. Pick anything in Star Wars that works incredibly well in toys - star fighters, role play lightsabers, knights with laser swords, wacky aliens with extra eyes, armored space army men with a bunch of specialized equipment - and Star Trek has the "Star War we have at home" counterpart: space panelvans that don't even have weapons and are only used in the show for getting stranded, laser guns that are invariably shot from the hip while standing still and usually to slowly melt open a door, middle aged men in jumpsuits packing the aforementioned laser guns, aliens with extra forehead ridges, and a wide cast of characters distinguished mainly by their academic disciplines and their interpersonal drama.

Star Trek has ships. Mostly in the categories of "Starfleet" and "low effort weekly but recognizable", with exceptions like the D-7, D'Deridex, and Ferengi shipship. And the biggest gimmicks of the Starfleet ships seem to be "sense of scale" and "internal illumination", as if someone had planned deliberately to make toys impossible. They also couldn't even fly cool until the CGI era.

Everything that made Star Wars so perfectly suited to launch one of the biggest toylines of all time is deftly avoided in Star Trek. Even adult fans don't want a ready room playset for chewing out the Lt. Commander and kids sure as hell never did.

And if you want to Star Trek as an adult, you have cosplay, or insanely involved and exorbitantly expensive model kit projects, I.e. the things the show was made with. And Pop! Vinyls, which are far more suited to Star Trek "action" than action figures ever will be.

 

[ooo-baby]

It can be done:

The creators and writers just need to think from the mindset of making toys. That’s what George Lucas do with Star Wars.

 

[Copper Bezel]

You want the show to sell toys? Are you being for real right now? You'd have to change the whole ethos of the series into something amenable to like, space power armor, giant alien slug monsters, transforming starfighters, giant arm mounted phaser blasters, and oh jive guys I think Disco S2-3 was onto something

Edit: Unless you mean those Mego ads as a positive example of something you think kids would actually be interested in already, in which case I cannot help you

 

[TM2-Megatron]

Trek toys have always been hot garbage.

Higher quality models and/or prop replicas, on the other hand, can be pretty cool. The upcoming TOMY die-cast Enterprise, the Wand Company TOS phaser and (Bluetooth "headset") communicator, Fanset delta badges, etc.

 

[ooo-baby]

Star Trek needs to design characters that are more aesthetically pleasing to kids. The Ferengi are too hard on the eyes. I think Voyager had a lot of that weirdness.

 

[The Predaking]

Some of the first Star Trek toys were some red and blue Army Men figurines with bright yellow Army tanks emblazoned with the words "Star Trek" on their sides.

There was also the delightfully stupid light-up helmet that had, of all things, a police siren on top of it.

Both of these, and more bizarre Star Trek toys, can be found here:

Set Phasers for Strange: 9 of the Most Unexpected Star Trek Collectables

"Weird is part of the job!" - Capt. Kathryn Janeway

www.startrek.com

The Star Trek helmet got used on screen in the Lower Decks season one finale.

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

You want the show to sell toys? Are you being for real right now? You'd have to change the whole ethos of the series into something amenable to like, space power armor, giant alien slug monsters, transforming starfighters, giant arm mounted phaser blasters, and oh jive guys I think Disco S2-3 was onto something

Edit: Unless you mean those Mego ads as a positive example of something you think kids would actually be interested in already, in which case I cannot help you

I'm convinced he's never been "for real" this whole thread.

 

[ooo-baby]

Per Quora:

Star Trek has always been half-hearted with it’s merchandising. I believe the root of this was that Gene Roddenberry felt he was making a show very much for adults and didn’t have much time for kids’ merch from an ideological point of view. George Lucas, on the other hand, knew he was making family entertainment and was envisioning merch tie-ins from the beginning.

There has always been a trickle of Star Trek stuff, but the only time I feel the franchise went all out marketing to kids was the Mego line of toys that came out beginning 1975. That was when the first generation who missed the show when it was first broadcast started getting old enough to get interested; like 6–year-old me for example.

They tried again in 1979 for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but that slow, philosophical, 2001-influenced film was the very antithesis of Star Wars, and Star Wars toys were saturating the market by then.

Since then, Star Trek merch seems to mainly have turned up in specialty shops such as comic book stores - again, aiming at adult and young adult Trekkers rather than a mass-market for kids and casual fans. But there was simply never nearly the amount of Trek toys as Wars because of how the franchises were conceived.

Gene Roddenberry picked the wrong toy company. George Lucas picked the right one. One that made action figures of every minor supporting character with screen time of just a few seconds. Action figures made Star Wars the big winner over Star Trek. Gene only wanted to tell stories. George only wanted to sell toys. Who is the better businessman? Go figure.

 

[Copper Bezel]

Whoever you're quoting seems to know what they're talking about, but are you following? Why is it desirable to you that Star Trek would have changed itself to support a popular line of toys?

The last time Gene Roddenberry came up, you were deeply convicted that the man could do no wrong. Well, personally, while I think there are a lot of things about Star Trek that should move on from his ideas, this is one place where I think he made the right call. Star Trek doesn't need to be merchandisable. The things that are interesting about Star Trek aren't toyetic and it would have had to make a lot of compromises to be a proper competitor to Star Wars in the 1980s toy aisle.

Forty years later, Star Trek is in the process of finding its identity again, and it's actually in a really good place and doesn't need a toyline shoved into it. The most toyetic Star Trek ever was Prodigy, and with all of five action figures based on it not even completing the bridge crew and not even a single transforming Protostar playset with shuttle replicator action or even a role-play phaser, Prodigy is itself in limbo for the completed second season to even be released because it was the least watched Trek show that Paramount couldn't get kids' eyeballs on. And toys are not what they were in the 1980s, most kids would probably prefer a Fortnite skin.

 

[ooo-baby]

Star Trek: The Original Series gave us the best toy of all, the cell phone.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I prefer my PADD

 

[Lobjob]

You need like 12 of them scattered across your desk for the full effect.

 

[ooo-baby]

Uhura’s Bluetooth earpiece is iconic:

 

[Copper Bezel]

Yes. And Fahrenheit 451 had AirPods in 1953.

 

[ooo-baby]

This scene was outrageous, warped, deranged, etc.:

Picard was wrong. If something slaughters whole planets of people, it must be killed. Period.

 

[Copper Bezel]

I don't remember the details of the episode and am only going on what's presented in the clip here, but I don't agree, I don't think this is one of those bad moments for Picard. The Enterprise can easily overpower the crystalline entity and they're currently chasing it down. They're not taking on any undue risk in trying to communicate with it before destroying it, and the easier it is to destroy the entity, the more responsibility I think Picard has to be sure that using force is warranted. If later on it's actively eating a planet and he's still wringing his hands instead of stopping it, that'd be deranged. But this scene is a reasonable disagreement between two people who have good reasons to see the situation the way they each do.

 

[ooo-baby]

Picard needs to learn from Kirk and Spock. This is how it’s done:

with strength and decisiveness.

 

[The Predaking]

I don't remember the details of the episode and am only going on what's presented in the clip here, but I don't agree, I don't think this is one of those bad moments for Picard. The Enterprise can easily overpower the crystalline entity and they're currently chasing it down. They're not taking on any undue risk in trying to communicate with it before destroying it, and the easier it is to destroy the entity, the more responsibility I think Picard has to be sure that using force is warranted. If later on it's actively eating a planet and he's still wringing his hands instead of stopping it, that'd be deranged. But this scene is a reasonable disagreement between two people who have good reasons to see the situation the way they each do.

I see why Picard and everyone wanted to communicate with the creature to try to stop it peacefully from destroying worlds. However, the creature literally goes around space and feeds on planets. Kind of hard to domesticate that type of creature. The thing almost killed Riker that episode along with a colony. Devastating the world and turning a paradise into an uninhabitable wasteland.

 

[G.B.Blackrock]

The question, in my mind, is not whether or not the crystalline entity needed to be destroyed. It's whether they should have done so without trying to find another way first. They'd only JUST discovered the possibility of communicating with the creature. They HAD to try to do so, if only on the hope that an alternative means of sustenance might be discovered for the entity that didn't involve it destroying inhabited planets. They didn't get that chance, but Picard and company was by no means wrong to try.

 

[ooo-baby]

And what about justice for this woman whose son this crystalline entity form killed?

Is she just sh#t out of luck?